After you’ve used Twitter for a time, you’ll want to measure your influence on Twitter as well as you’re performing from month to month. Unless you want to hire someone to spend the day counting and analyzing your retweets, take a look at the free tools below (some may have paid premium versions) and put them to use on behalf of your nonprofit, social enterprise, business — or your own brand.

Klout: Measure influence and style

Klout is a visual, logical way to quickly see the main thing most organizations want to know about Twitter: where you stand against the competition. The application’s initial strength is the ease with which you can compare yourself to your peers. After using Klout for about a month, however, the information becomes more advanced, if not just downright complimentary. My “Klout Style” page, for example, offers sleek flattery such as: “You don’t just share news, you create the news” and “When you speak, people listen.” Thanks, Klout! How’s my tie look?

Rating: ★ ★ ★

PeerIndex: Assess your online social capital

Where Klout was accessible and easy to decipher, I found PeerIndex a bit baffling. PeerIndex separates itself by measuring how your tweets “resonate” with others. They include ranking on several important-sounding topics, such as “authority,” “activity” and “realness.” Klout said I was influential, but PeerIndex seems to think my influence is limited. After reading through the Scores and Ranking page in the hopes of defining these terms, I came away still mystified about how the topics work and what they mean. On the plus side, if you use this tool at work, you can probably sound impressive in an office meeting by reporting to your boss that the Twitter project is highly authoritative. It might be a strong tool, but when all is said and done, I didn’t dig too deep into the site. However, it has a nice comparison graph that allows you to add and remove other Twitter users.

Rating: ★ ★

Twitalyzer: A subscription-model tool

Twitalyzer operates mainly on a subscription model, but gives away some basic features for free. I’m not in a position to pay $99/month to track my competition or get daily email alerts, so I can’t speak about its full range of offerings. I do feel comfortable saying it may not worth $99/month to spy on Cogsley Cogs’ Twitter statistics and your time would be better spent working on your own page. With a free account, I was able to log in and immediately see my relative percentile (only as ranked among other Twitalyzer users, though) and a map that informed me that most of my views come from New Jersey. It also told me what my Klout and PeerIndex ratings were. This seems like a tool better suited to analyzing your competition than to analyzing yourself.

Rating: ★ ★

TweetStats: Graph your stats!

Tweetstats remains true to its name, as it compiles a bar graph for quick viewing of your monthly stats. Easily see who you @replied to, whom you retweet and what time of day you tweet the most. A useful, basic tool that will offer a helpful overview for any Twitter campaign your nonprofit or business undertakes.

Rating: ★ ★ ★

Crowdbooster: Schedule and analyze

Of all the applications I used, Crowdbooster was my personal favorite. In addition to analyzing your influence and impressions, they also set themselves apart with useful features like the ability to schedule a tweet at the time where it will reach the most amount of followers. They provide actionable recommendations on influential users, offering the option to follow them back from inside their application. I found their charts clear and precise, and their analysis was directly applicable to my Twitter page.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

Tweet Grader: Score your profile

Part of a suite of free online marketing tools powered by HubSpot, Tweet Grader is a straightforward tool that measures the power of your Twitter profile. Type in your Twitter handle and Tweet Grader generates a score out of 100 for your overall Twitter profile. You can also use it to find out the scores of other Twitter users and then compare those to your own. In calculating your score, Tweet Grader’s algorithm takes into account the following factors: number and power of followers, follower-to-following ratio, update frequency and most recent, as well as engagement. The site is also handy for seeing top lists, generated by Twitter Grader based on its scoring system. Use it to locate the “Twitter elite,” i.e. Top Users, Top Brands and even Top Women on Twitter.

Rating ★ ★

Tweet Reach: Insight into your tweets

Ever wondered about the value of a tweet? With Tweet Reach, you can get analytics that measure the impact of social media conversations. You can search based on a URL, Twitter name, phrase or hashtag. Tweet Reach then analyzes all the tweets that match your search and generates a report that includes exposure data on those tweets. Extremely useful if your organization uses a specific hashtag often and you want to be able to see how far-reaching the conversation is. The downside is that the free service generates a very basic report, which tells you stats only for the most recent 50 tweets for your search term. For a more detailed report, you can pony up $20 and go into the nitty gritty about your tweets.

• Twitter tutorials: Twitter Lists, hashtags, Twitter stats & moreKyria Abrahams is the author of “I’m Perfect, You’re Doomed – Tales From A Jehovah’s Witness Upbringing.” She has worked in the field of Web design and content creation for the past 10 years.

Thanks Kyria – happy to help you better understand the interface at PeerIndex. But would love to know what was not working for you. I am at sanford [AT] peerindex [DOT] com.

Kyria Abrahams

Hi Sanford, Thanks for the offer. I think my main confusion was in not finding a page that clearly defined the terms you use in layman’s terms. I wasn’t exactly sure *what* was being measured. That’s just my experience, of course. Others might understand perfectly.

Sad to say I just got my Disqus notification. The answer is you should be able to find it here: http://www.peerindex.com/help/faq But I understand the need for a better clarification of these terms and I hope the Marketing team is thinking on this.

Kyria – I love it. Thank you for choosing to highlight us alongside these great companies. I finally got a chance to review the post. We hope to continue to delight you with unique and useful offerings. Please let us know if we can ever be helpful.

May I suggest an addition? NodeXL is the free and open network overview discovery and exploration add-in for Excel that adds social media network analysis features to te familiar spreadsheet. NodeXL features several social media importers (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Blogs, WWW, email, etc.) that make creating maps of social networks easy to do. Using NodeXL it is possible to generate analysis and insights into the key people and groups in the populations talking about any topic, brand, event, or person.